Valerie Plame’s Modern Odyssey (and Cautionary Tale) of Speaking Truth to Power
Release Date: 11/01/2023
John Marks’ Journey from Provocateur to Peacemaker
Living A Life In Full
It seems that almost everywhere in the world, there is conflict, distrust, and unrest – Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, and even here in the US. Oftentimes, any kind of diplomacy, cooperation, agreement, detente or finding a common ground seems impossible. But what if there was a different way? What if there was an organization that holds as its mission, “to transform the way the world deals with conflict, away from adversarial approaches and toward cooperative solutions?” What if those tactics included dialogue training, joint development projects, public art projects, sports leagues, and social...
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Ben Guttmann on the Power of Simplicity
Living A Life In Full
We are not as smart as we think we are. We're busy and distracted in a world that is incentivized to continually make us more of both. The only things that work, the only messages that cut through the noise, are sharp, clear, and direct. We’ve all been advised to “not judge a book by its cover,” to “not count your chickens before they hatch,” and that “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Maybe for you, what comes to mind is something political, like Patrick Henry’s revolutionary “Give me liberty, or give me death!” or more recently, Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can.” Now...
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Daniel Goleman, PhD, on Emotional Intelligence and Optimal Performance on
Living A Life In Full
You have likely seen moments of peak performance—perhaps an athlete plays a perfect game or a business that has a quarter with once-in-a-lifetime profits. Perhaps you have experienced something similar – playing a musical piece perfectly, making a faultless shot, or perhaps acing a final. But these moments are often elusive, and for every amazing day, we may have a hundred ordinary or even unsatisfying days. Now, imagine your best day at work - you exceed the goals set for you, your interactions with coworkers are productive and bristle-free, the new system you implemented has...
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Topaz Adizes on How a Single Conversation Can Change a Relationship Forever
Living A Life In Full
Have you ever found yourself in the presence of someone you love dearly and had nothing to say? The silence, not indicative of your care for the other, nor of your desire to connect with them, and yet there were no words you could grasp to articulate the depth or quality of your connection to them. Or, have you found yourself in the same looped pattern of conversation with someone you love? Feeling as though you were treading the same path repeatedly, and it was simply exhausting? Or, even worse, it was deteriorating your connection. We all crave connection. But sometimes we need help...
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Rob Schwartz on Life's Greatest Lesson
Living A Life In Full
Over 20 million copies of one of the most famous memoirs of all-time, “” written by , have been sold since its 1997 publication, and to this day it remains on many a college’s required reading list. Twenty-eight years after Morrie Schwartz passed away, his son Rob Schwartz, has edited his father’s last work, and posthumously published what has become a bestselling new book, “.” Rob is a journalist and entrepreneur, having founded a number of companies, both in Japan and the US, and held executive positions in others. He’s produced numerous film and music projects...
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Alex Tapscott on the Promise of Digital Disruption
Living A Life In Full
When you think of modern technologies that aren’t gadgets and gizmos, you probably think of the Web, and with it, the Internet. If so, you aren’t really thinking of modern technologies. We are entering a new age. We’ve moved from the “Read-only Web,” which had little functionality for interacting with content, to the “Read-Write Web,” which offered seemingly endless collaborative opportunities, from sharing things with friends and family to shopping at your favorite brands. But the profusion of cyberattacks, data hacks, and online profiling have left many of us to view...
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Mountaineer, Entrepreneur, Guinness World Record Holder, and Mom: Jenn Drummond on Becoming BreakProof
Living A Life In Full
We all have an Everest. Even if you are not an alpinist or mountaineer, we are all on individual journeys, facing ascents and descents as we strive toward our personal and professional peaks. Whether yours is to achieve a big, audacious goal, or to find a way to coexist better with your mother-in-law, how you navigate the journey is up to you. You can choose to stop, to turn around, or to keep going. And you can choose to find meaning in the challenges along the way and embrace the joy in the journey. And what if you could transform challenges into triumphs? Well, Jenn Drummond has...
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Octavia Goredema on Doing Work that Matters
Living A Life In Full
How do you get the job, or position, or career, where the work that you do matters - and not just to your employer - but to you? Few experiences in life are as awful as the feeling of being trapped in the wrong career. But how do you find a job that truly resonates with you? And once you’ve found it, how do you develop the confidence to take the necessary steps to arrive at the career of your dreams? Or how do you recover from a career setback and seize new opportunities? Or, what if you are returning after a time away from being in the workforce? How do you deal with the uncertainty...
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Creativity and Innovation in Business and Design: Lance Cayko on (re)Inventing Architecture
Living A Life In Full
At the intersection of architecture is art, creativity, design, engineering, sociology, psychology, and inspiration, not to mention survival, sustainability, and comfort. It’s been said that architecture is the art we live in. We’re all impacted by the communities in which we live, the spaces in which we work, along with the places we visit and experience throughout our lives. So what is it that makes for good architectural design? How does a space become iconic? How does an architect go from project, to design, to engineering, to completion? Well, Lance Cayko knows a lot about...
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Eduardo Briceño on the Performance Paradox: When Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect
Living A Life In Full
To succeed in a fast-changing world, individuals and companies know they must create a culture of growth, where experimentation and feedback are encouraged, and learning is integrated into the everyday. Yet we often get stuck in a well-worn pattern of habits that don’t move us forward. Why? How do you get better at something? You do a lot of it. The 10,000 hour rule. Practice makes perfect, right? Maybe not. What if our focus only on performing doesn’t lead to the hoped for improvements, and instead our performance suffers? Well, there is a strange phenomenon that runs counter to what most...
info_outlineOn July 6, 2003, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's historic op-ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," appeared in The New York Times. A week later, Robert Novak revealed in his Washington Post column that Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative.
It ended her covert career and set off a political scandal that rocked the Bush/Cheney White House. The public disclosure of that secret information spurred a federal investigation and led to the trial and conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and the Wilsons' civil suit against top officials of the Bush administration.
Valerie had worked to protect America’s national security and prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, in particular, nuclear weapons. All that ended, with the public disclosure.
Valerie has amazing resilience and skillsets. Today she is serves on a number of boards and is affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute, the trans-disciplinary scientific think tank created by two Nobel Prize winners to address the most compelling and complex problems in the world today.
Valerie has lectured throughout the country and internationally on cyber security issues, national security, nuclear proliferation, women in intelligence, and the NSA revelations, and authored The New York Times best-selling memoir Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, which was also released as a major motion picture of the same name starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.
Along with Sarah Lovett, she’s written two fictional spy thrillers Blowback and Burned. She also served as the narrator and appeared as an expert in the film Countdown to Zero, a documentary on the threat of nuclear war. Valerie also heads up the TED-like annual conference, Spies, Lies, and Nukes in Santa Fe.
Valerie has lived her life in full in public, and private service and is an inspiration to each and every one of us.